CLAIRE, 1961
They called her mother-in-law Birdy. Everyone did. Even Peter called her Birdy instead of Mom or Mother. Claire never liked it. To her, birds were small, delicate things with hearts beating fast in their chests and lovely feathers and songs. This Birdy was tall and big-boned. No bright plumage. No catchy songs. Think pelicans, Peter teased. Think flamingos. Still, the nickname always caught in her throat. It’s what my father always called her, Peter had explained. But she’s so un-bird-like, Claire insisted.
Claire glanced out the window at the snow falling steadily. In her hand she held the invitation, a formal one on heavy paper with green embossed leaves climbing up one side and the words:
Come Celebrate Birdy’s 80th Birthday
January 19, 1961
8 p.m.
THE HOPE CLUB PROVIDENCE
The truth was, she didn’t want to go her mother-in-law’s—to Birdy’s—birthday party. What she wanted was to stay right here and go to her neighbor Dot’s inauguration brunch tomorrow morning. The entire neighborhood would be there, and they would watch John F. Kennedy take the oath of office. All of the women were guessing what color Jackie would wear, and the winner got a daiquiri party. Pink, Claire had guessed, and she felt certain she would win. She could picture Jackie in pink. That dark hair against pale pink, against the winter sky. Now she wasn’t even sure if she’d get to watch the inauguration at all. Would Birdy want to sit around and wait to hear what Kennedy had to say? Or what Jackie wore? Claire had considered using her condition to stay home, and let Peter go off to Rhode Island alone. But she owed him. She knew that.
Still, with him out of the house, Claire thought she might be able to breathe, to think straight. Because the truth was she had not really thought straight since Dougie Daniels went missing. The baby inside her rolled lazily, and Claire put her hand on her stomach as if to say good morning. Outside the window, the snow was accumulating fast. This storm was supposed to move all the way to New England, and they would be right in it. They should have left last night, Claire thought. They should stay home.
At the corner, their big green Chevy station wagon turned, inching along the slippery road. Peter, always prepared, an Eagle Scout still at thirty-two, had gone to fill the gas tank and check the oil and tires.
“Romper!” Kathy was saying. “Romper! Romper!”
“You’re right, Kitty Kat,” Claire said, lifting her daughter from the high chair. “It is time for Romper Room.”
She carried Kathy, clutching her stuffed rabbit Mimi, into the den and turned on Romper Room. Miss Bonnie was already looking through her Magic Mirror.
“And I see Debbie, and I see Wendy,” Miss Bonnie said.
“See Kathy!” Kathy shouted at the television. “See Mimi!”
Claire went back into the kitchen and stood at the window again, staring out at the snow, her husband’s headlights moving straight for her. She didn’t love him. Every time she had that thought, she felt like she was strangling. Literally, she gasped for breath. She didn’t love her husband and she was pregnant with a baby that she didn’t think was his. Just six months ago, she would never have believed that she would be a woman standing by a window in a situation like this. But here she was.
“Reach for stars!” Kathy sang from the living room.
Claire leaned forward, barely able to lean across the expanse of her belly and press her head against the cold pane of the window.
She heard the car stopping, its engine dying. She heard the car door open and then shut, her husband stomping across the snow.
Gulping for air, she tried to shut out her thoughts. A woman in 1961, who did not love her husband, had nowhere to go. A woman who’d had an affair and been caught, had no choice but to hope her husband forgave her and would let her stay. So then why did Claire want neither of these things to happen, not forgiveness, not to stay? What was wrong with her?
The kitchen door opened.
Miss Bonnie sang, “There goes Jupiter, here comes Mars . . .”
“Claire?” Peter said.
She swallowed as much air as she could take in.
Her husband was walking across the gold-speckled linoleum floor toward her. She could see his wingtips covered in rubber galoshes.
“Honey?” he was saying. “Are you okay?”
She lifted her head and gave him a weak smile. “Just dizzy,” she said, her hands floating above her belly as evidence.
“Come sit,” he said.
He put his hands on her shoulders and guided her to the chair at the head of the table, the one called the captain’s chair. Their eyes met briefly. Claire was the first to look away.
“Water?” he asked, already moving to the sink.
But Claire shook her head.
Peter stood in the middle of their kitchen, looking lost.
“Do you think it’s safe?” she asked him. “To drive all that way in this?”
His jaw tightened. “Jesus, Claire. It’s her eightieth birthday. We can’t miss that.”
Claire waited, hoping he would say the next thing on his own. You stay, Claire.
But instead he said, “The car’s in tip-top shape. You packed?”
She nodded. The kitchen table was strewn with the remains of a roll of wrapping paper, dark red and white, and threads of silver ribbon. Claire picked up Birdy’s present, a collection of poems by Robert Frost. Birdy loved poetry. And Frost was reading a poem tomorrow at the inauguration.
“I’ll get Kathy,” she said, heaving herself to her feet.
At night, Claire put herself to sleep by doing the math to determine just how pregnant she was. At five months with Kathy, she’d only gained ten pounds; this time she’d gained more than double that. Did that mean she was more than five months pregnant? In which case this baby was indeed Peter’s. But no matter how she calculated, she always got the same answer. This baby was not her husband’s.
“Claire?” Peter was calling from down the hall. “Just the one suitcase?”
She stared down at the pretty wrapping paper, the mess of ribbon and scraps and tape.
“You fit everything in just the one?” he was saying.
“Yes,” Claire said, deciding to leave the mess until they got back.
Her lover’s name was Miles Sullivan, and he was not her type. Or what Claire had always thought was her type, which was tall and well-muscled with a face that seemed to be carved from marble. No, Miles—though tall, taller even than Peter—had the start of a paunch, his stomach pressing against his belt, and a fleshy ruddy face with almost a cartoonish nose. In his way, he was handsome, she supposed. Black Irish, he had described himself, which meant a head of thick dark hair that he wore slightly too shaggy and round bright blue eyes. His smile dazzled, but it was not those blue eyes or his imposing size or even that smile that attracted her to him from the start. It was the way he listened to her. He cocked his head, and turned his eyes on her as if she had something important to say. That very first night at Dot’s dinner party, Claire had noticed this and wondered if Peter had ever listened to her in quite this way. He had not, she decided. Not once.
Of course, there was desire too. A desire like Claire had never felt before. And she was embarrassed that somehow this desire was wrapped up in Dougie Daniels’ disappearance. Yet once that happened, something stirred in Claire for the first time. She remembered a night in Rome when she was an air hostess and she and her roommate Rose had met two men at a trattoria, gotten drunk with them, and then taken them back to the hotel. That night, Claire had done things she’d never before imagined doing with a man. It was the wine and the summer Roman air and all the Sambuca and the riding on the Vespa with the wind in her hair. But she’d never seen that man again. And she’d never spoken of that night, not even with Rose.
Now this thing, this stirring, could not be satisfied. Embarrassed after what happened with Peter, she’d tried to feed it in other ways: tennis and hot baths and even some of the diet pills Roberta’s doctor gave her (those only led her to do things like vacuum or polish the silver, and lose five pounds too many). At first, talking to Miles seemed to work. His head cocked like that, his questions, probing, asking what she thought and felt, what she wanted. But soon, her desire grew into something more, as if she wished he could actually climb inside her and fill her, fill this unnameable need she had. To both of their surprise, she had been the one to lean in for the first kiss, the one to unbuckle his belt and reach her hand inside. I’m suffocating, she had told him that first time. With him, she could breathe. She could say whatever was on her mind, wonder aloud about why a soufflé had failed to rise or what she would bring to a desert island or anything, really, that popped into her head. No matter what it was, Miles listened.
That was why she invited him into her home, a stupid idea. But with Peter at work in the city, and the neighborhood settled into its routines, she imagined a whole day with Miles. She’d made a pitcher of perfect Manhattans, carefully measuring the sweet and dry vermouths, dropping six neon-red cherries into the amber liquid. She put on a lace bra and matching panties in a color called champagne, bought at Hecht’s just for this day.
“A tryst,” Miles had said when he arrived, his hand slipping into her silk blouse to discover the lace waiting there.
It was a gray September morning, the kind of day that reminds you that summer is over and fall is on its way. Claire had dropped Kathy at the sitter’s, spurting lies about errands and appointments that would keep her out all day.
“Manhattans in the morning?” he’d said as he watched her place ice cubes into the heavy glasses, then pour the drinks.
“Why not?” Claire had said.
“Why not indeed,” he said, raising his glass to hers and clinking. “Obviously,” he said, “to us.”
They had talked that day too. About the election—that was all anybody could talk about. About Claire’s fascination with Jackie. About his fascination with Marilyn Monroe. But then the talking stopped. They were half drunk, having sloppy sex first on the sofa Peter hated and then on the twin bed in Kathy’s room, the one she’d never slept in yet, which they were planning on moving her from the crib onto by Thanksgiving. Miles had ripped her new lace bra. She had banged her knee on his chin, then laughed at the fact that her knee was even near his chin.
Outside, she heard voices, someone getting into or out of a car.
She felt reckless and alive. She clawed at Miles. He was saying something to her, his breath boozy and sweet, all bourbon and cherries. The air around them seemed electrified. That stirring in her, that thing, was an abyss, a chasm, something that needed to be filled. She told him that she needed to run away. Do women ever do that? Run away from their perfect lives? Miles had looked at her hard. No, he told her, they run away from their imperfect lives.
He kissed her, and she opened her mouth to him, tangled her fingers in all that dark hair.
Then Claire opened her eyes.
In the doorway stood Peter, his tie in a perfect Windsor knot, a pulse beating in his temple.
“Get out,” he said calmly, and at first she thought he was speaking to her.
But then she realized that he was talking to Miles, who was struggling to his feet, dragging the white sheet patterned with daisies along with him.
“Get out of my house,” Peter said.
Claire had the comforter around her now, covering herself with it, the daisies everywhere.
Miles gathered his clothes. When he walked past Peter, Peter seemed not to notice. He could only look at Claire, as if he were trying to find his wife somewhere in that bed.
“Get dressed,” he said finally.
“I . . . need some privacy,” she said. “I need a minute.”
Peter didn’t leave. He watched her clumsily pull her blue silk blouse on over her torn bra, watched her try to button the buttons.
“Are you drunk?” he asked her, his voice for the first time since he’d walked in revealing emotion.
Claire nodded. What was the point in denying any of it?
“Peter,” she said, “I’m so unhappy.”
“Unhappy?” he said, almost in wonder.
“I don’t know what I want or what I feel. I thought I wanted this. Us. But now I’m not so sure.” Her only lie that. She couldn’t hurt him more than she already had.
Peter shook his head.
“I can’t look at you,” he said, and he turned and walked out.
To Claire it seemed they would be trapped in the overheated car forever.
Peter had barely spoken since they started driving north. His hands in the brown leather driving gloves Claire had bought him for Christmas clutched the steering wheel hard, and his nose was red from the cold.
Outside, the snow fell furiously. Claire sat uncomfortable and frightened beside him. The station wagon, that massive green thing that she hated to drive, even on sunny days or for short errands, fishtailed and slid on the slick road.
“She’s so excited about this party,” Peter said. He let out a low whistle. “Eighty years young,” he said.
Claire chewed on her bottom lip, the waxy taste of her lipstick almost pleasant. They hadn’t eaten anything since they left five hours earlier. She didn’t dare ask Peter to stop, even though she would love a grilled cheese sandwich and a cup of coffee. Every so many miles, she saw the orange roof of a Howard Johnson’s through the snow on the side of the road. But she didn’t bother to mention it.
Peter was hunched over the steering wheel now. “Goddamn it! I can’t see anything.”
Claire took a tissue from her purse, and wiped away the condensation on the windshield.
“Don’t do that,” Peter said. “It’s leaving smears.”
He had always been this way: demanding, a perfectionist, someone who wanted things done his way. Until last summer, Claire had accommodated him. She hadn’t liked it, the way he could be so critical of others, including her. Especially her. She hadn’t liked that when she tried to tell him what she thought or felt, he might walk out of the room, saying, “Keep going. I can hear you.” And Claire would be alone in an empty room, feeling foolish. Still, he loved her. She knew that. He loved her the best way he could. But Claire wasn’t sure that was enough anymore.
She shook her head, as if to shake these thoughts away. For weeks now she’d been doing nothing but worrying about what to do about her marriage. Women did not leave. Unless there had been adultery or abuse, and even then, they usually stayed. She remembered the story of a woman who had lived a few streets away, long before Claire and Peter moved into the neighborhood. She’d left her husband and the judge had not let her take her children. She abandoned them, Dot had explained, her face set in disgust. If she left Peter, would a judge let Claire keep her children? Or should she stay and possibly never feel happy again?
Claire swallowed hard, then offered, “There’s a Howard Johnson’s up ahead. Maybe you could use a cup of coffee.”
“Maybe,” he said, softening.
He liked when she took care of him; Claire knew this. But it was getting harder for her to take care of him when she didn’t really like him very much anymore. She had to keep reminding herself that it was her job to care for him. That was what wives did.
“It might be a long night. We might as well have a little something in our stomachs.” He added gently, “You, of course, already have a little something in yours.”
Claire laughed politely. This baby did not feel at all little. It jammed up against her ribs and pressed on her bladder. It made her short of breath and short on patience. When Peter made love to her now, she kept her nightgown on. She didn’t feel very pretty these days.
Relieved, Claire felt the car slow even more and make a slippery turn into the Howard Johnson’s.
“Maybe I can call Birdy and be sure the party is still on,” Peter said, opening his door and stepping into the night.
The snow seemed to gobble him up. If only, Claire thought. She imagined that when she too stepped out of the car, Peter would really have vanished. She would go inside and wait out the storm, sipping coffee and dreaming of her new life, free of her husband. Stop it, she told herself. You are married to this man, for better or worse. When she had spoken those words four years ago, she had meant them, hadn’t she?
Peter’s voice cut through the storm. “What are you waiting for?” he called.
Claire sighed and got out of the car. She opened the back door, and awkwardly lifted their sleeping daughter into her arms.
“Come on, baby,” Claire murmured to Kathy.
Kathy wrapped her arms around Claire’s neck and hung on her like a koala bear. The parking lot hadn’t been plowed yet, and Claire had to pick her way slowly across it, trying not to fall. Peter stood in the harsh light by the front door, smoking and waiting for them. Claire could feel his impatience in the air.
“Of all days for the world to come to an end,” she heard him saying.
Kathy’s breath, sour from the potato chips she’d eaten in the car, warmed Claire’s cheek.
Finally, they reached the entrance. Claire panted from the walk and the weight.
Peter dropped his cigarette and crushed it with his boot.
Claire grabbed at his arm.
“What?” he said. His eyes were bloodshot from the hard drive.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “If I could take it back, I would.”
Their eyes met briefly before he walked over to the hostess, stomping snow from his overshoes as he did.
Claire watched him. She was sorry. Sorry about the blizzard. Sorry that she’d fallen for another man and had an affair with him. Sorry Peter had caught them together, Claire and this man. She let herself remember him for a moment. How they thought so alike he sometimes could finish her sentences. The way he kissed her with such ardor. His ability to laugh and be—oh, the word that Claire thought of was carefree. He could be carefree while Peter always seemed so serious, so burdened.
Standing in this restaurant, her husband’s angry eyes on her, the storm raging outside, Claire even let herself miss Miles.
Peter was in the orange vinyl booth now, opening the large menu.
Claire walked clumsily toward him.
“I always like the fried clams here,” he said, without looking up.
“They are good,” Claire said, even though all during this pregnancy fried foods made her sick. Also certain fruits—melon, pears, grapes. And tomatoes. Or were tomatoes fruit too? She wasn’t certain.
She glanced around for a high chair for Kathy. The restaurant was oddly bright and very crowded. Travelers had decided to pull over, out of the storm, like they had, and there was a buzz in the room, a sense of being in something together. The name Kennedy swirled above the noise, adding to the excitement of the blizzard.
“Are you going to sit?” Peter said, as if he had just noticed her.
Kathy, asleep against her shoulder, mumbled.
“I was looking for a high chair,” Claire said.
He’s the man we need, she heard. Things will be different now.
“Oh, for God’s sake,” Peter said. “Does anybody work here?” He waved at a waitress who carried a large tray overflowing with plastic baskets of food.
Claire’s cheeks grew hot. He was always short, even rude, with people in service jobs: waitresses, the washing machine salesman at Sears, Roebuck, bellboys and meter readers. It embarrassed her, the way he snapped his fingers and ordered them about. Even on their first date, a romantic steak dinner at Frankie & Johnnie’s on West 45th Street in Manhattan, he’d acted like that. Claire had two brandy Alexanders and French wine and crème de menthe afterwards. She’d blamed the drinks for the flush that crept up her chest and neck when he complained about the temperature of their soup, that his steak was overdone. When he’d snapped his fingers at the busboy, she’d looked down and sipped her cocktail.
The waitress delivered the food to a large rowdy group of men and boys, all wearing red shirts with logos, a team of some kind. When she was done, she came over to their table. Her uniform was splattered with ketchup and brown gravy and she looked exhausted.
“Two fried clam dinners,” Peter said, snapping his menu shut. He didn’t even glance at the waitress.
“Oh, just one,” Claire said.
He frowned, confused. “You just told me you wanted the fried clams. You said you loved them.”
In her wet boots, Claire could feel her feet swelling. She looked at the waitress, a tired woman with rings of smeared mascara beneath her eyes and a drooping ponytail.
“Just a grilled corn muffin for me,” Claire said. “And a hot dog for Kathy.”
The waitress wrote the order on her pad.
“I’m sorry,” Claire said. “And a high chair?”
“Right,” the waitress said. She lumbered off in her white nurse’s shoes.
“Why do you do that?” Peter said.
“Do what?” Claire lowered herself to the very edge of the booth, the only place her belly and the sleeping child could fit.
“Apologize,” Peter said, leveling his gaze directly at her in a way that made her look away. “For everything.”
“I don’t,” she said.
“You did it just now. Apologized for asking her to get a high chair when that’s part of her job.”
In the booth behind her, two men argued about how Kennedy’s Catholicism would affect the country. The pope’s our new boss, one man said. You’ll see.
“Claire?” Peter said.
“It’s just politeness,” Claire said. “That’s all.”
“Well, it’s annoying.”
Claire nodded. Since Peter had walked into that room that day, the traits of hers that annoyed him had multiplied. She touched her hair too often. She wasn’t a good listener or a careful shopper. She could not parallel-park. Claire did not argue with him when he attacked her this way. It was her guilt that kept her silent. She knew that. Her guilt and her foolish idea of how to be a wife. Of course, she reminded herself, if she truly believed that foolish idea, she would not have slept with another man.
The waitress arrived with the high chair, banging into tables as she did. The high chair was covered in vinyl with a cowboy pattern. Claire stood to put Kathy into the seat. The waitress helped her to hold the child while she buckled the strap and slid the tray in place. Gently, Claire lowered her daughter’s head onto the tray, smoothing her tangled brown hair.
“Where’s our coffee?” Peter said.
“You didn’t order coffee,” the waitress said, flipping the pages of her pad until she found their order. “Two fried clams, then one fried clam, a grilled corn muffin, and a hot dog.”
“And coffee,” Peter said.
The waitress didn’t answer him. As she walked away, she squeezed Claire’s shoulder.
We’ll all have to become Catholics, the man behind her said. You know that, don’t you?
Claire leaned across the table. “Can you hear this?” she whispered, motioning with her head.
Peter nodded. “Foolish, isn’t it?’ he said.
“Yes,” she said.
“What do you know about it?”
“Well,” Claire said, “for one thing, I know we won’t all have to become Catholics.”
Peter laughed. “Some people worry about what’s next. If we have a Catholic president, then who knows? We might even have a Jewish one someday.”
“Or Negro,” Claire said.
Peter grinned. “There will be no stopping anyone.”
With the tension diffused momentarily, Claire relaxed a bit. How ironic, she thought, that Miles had been the man to talk these ideas out with her. And now this was what her husband found interesting. Four years earlier, on Election Day, Peter had told her as he left for work, “Remember to vote for Stevenson,” as if she wouldn’t know who to vote for. But they were newlyweds then, and she’d found it charming, how he liked to think for her.
“I thought when you worked on the campaign it was just out of boredom,” Peter was saying, watching her face.
“I told you I believed in John F. Kennedy. I told you it was a passion.”
“Yes,” Peter said. “You did.”
The waitress arrived with their food, announcing each item as she placed it on the table. Fried clams. Grilled corn muffin. Hot dog. Claire saw that she wore a wedding ring, a thin gold band with a small diamond ring above it.
The greasy smell of the clams made Claire queasy. She took a quick bite of her muffin, hoping it would settle her stomach.
“We never got our coffee,” Peter said. He had already begun to eat his clams, dipping them in the tartar sauce and splashing ketchup on the French fries.
The waitress sighed.
“Busy day, huh?” Claire said to her.
“I’m working a double,” the waitress said. “Some of the girls couldn’t get in ’cause of the snow.”
Claire wondered how late the woman would have to be here working. By the matter-of-fact way she had helped get Kathy in the high chair, Claire thought she must also have a child. Or children. And a husband at home while she served cranky people food all day. And then drove home through this blizzard.
“Sorry,” Claire said as the waitress went for the coffee.
“You just did it again,” Peter said. “Why should you be sorry because she can’t get the order right?”
Suddenly, all Claire wanted to do was sleep. She wanted to be in her own bed back in Alexandria with its layers of warm blankets and the familiar pattern of violets on the wallpaper, the curtains drawn against the snow.
“I don’t know, Peter,” Claire said wearily. “I just am.”
He looked confused. “You’re sorry because she’s not good at her job?”
“I’m sorry she’s working in this storm instead of being home with her husband.”
The waitress returned. “Two coffees,” she said, placing the cups on the table.
“Thank you,” Claire said. Steam rose from them, and the bitter smell comforted her. She wrapped her hands around the cup to warm them.
Peter added milk to his coffee, then to Claire’s. A small gesture of kindness that she appreciated since he was so rarely kind to her anymore. She smiled to let him know that and, for an instant, his face softened.
“Peter,” Claire said. “Look.”
The waitress was standing across the aisle from them, taking orders from new customers who had just come in, noisily shaking snow from their coats and stomping their boots. At this angle, Claire saw clearly that the waitress was pregnant. As far along as Claire, maybe more.
Peter followed her gaze. “Jesus,” he said.
“Poor thing. Working two shifts.”
“People do what they have to,” he said.
“Still.”
“It’s not right,” he said.
Claire reached across the table and took his hand, oddly grateful for her own easy life. Instinctively, he recoiled at her touch. She almost apologized, but stopped herself.
The afternoon that Peter discovered them, after Miles left, after she’d dressed and gone into the living room where her husband sat on the turquoise Danish sofa they had argued over buying, she sat across from him in the square pink chair. He had thought that modern furniture wasn’t comfortable or inviting enough, and sitting there that afternoon, Claire understood what he meant. It was all angles and wood, this Danish contemporary.
Peter had demanded details. Not when or where they had met, but what they had done. “How many times?” Peter asked her. “Did he come inside of you?”
Out of spite or fear or something else, Claire told him. “I have lost track of how many times,” she said. “And he does come inside me. Yes.”
Peter jumped off the sofa, his eyes wild. As he loomed in front of her, she thought for a moment he might hit her. But he just stood with that scary look on his face, a look that told her he was capable of anything.
The clock, the one she thought looked like a sunburst and he thought looked like a spider, ticked into the silence.
“I have to pick up Kathy at the sitter’s,” Claire said finally.
She stood. He didn’t move. She put on her white car coat, not because the weather had turned cool but for protection. From the pocket, she took a tube of lipstick, Rio Red, and smeared it across her lips. She took the car keys from the little ring where they hung.
When she reached the door, Peter said, “If you see him again I’ll kill you.”
Claire turned to her husband. “No you won’t. You’re not a murderer,” she said.
Her heart was beating so fast she thought she might be having a heart attack. She didn’t wait for him to answer, she just walked out.
Despite everything, she did not end the affair right away. Instead, she waited until after the election. Perhaps it was part of her recklessness then, but she kept meeting Miles. Every Monday night she went to campaign headquarters in the law office and sat beside him, calling people to urge them to vote for JFK. They sat at big desks, and drank cold bottles of Coca-Cola, the fat White Pages open in front of them. At nine o’clock, they left along with everyone else, and went to their separate cars, and drove around the block, meeting back in the parking lot where she got into his car and they drove off together. They had one hour to say all the things they wanted to say to each other, to touch each other, to wonder how they could be together. Usually, they parked in an empty bank parking lot down the street. Claire believed that they were in love, and they had just that one hour on Monday nights and Wednesday afternoons together.
On election night, in the Hilton Hotel ballroom, under a ceiling of balloons and streamers, she had kissed him for the last time.
“We won,” he’d said into her mouth. His hand was on the small of her back, and she stood slightly on tiptoe to reach his lips.
By then, she had learned she was pregnant.
“We won,” she said back to him, letting him press his body against hers. She said it, even though she knew it wasn’t so.
While Peter went to call Birdy, Claire tried to feed Kathy the hot dog. She had woken up, fussy and disoriented. In their rush to leave, Claire had forgotten to take Mimi, Kathy’s stuffed bunny, and now Kathy was in a panic, demanding it. “I need her!” she wailed. “Go get her! Get Mimi!”
“Mimi’s at home asleep,” Claire said.
“I need her!”
The waitress walked by, carrying a tray of empty glasses.
“Excuse me,” Claire said, stopping her. “Could you fill this bottle with warm milk please?”
Kathy’s cries pierced the restaurant.
“Tough having to take her out in a storm like this,” the waitress said, taking the bottle.
Claire busied herself with getting Kathy out of the high chair. All of her movements were so clumsy now it was hard to imagine she had ever been graceful. Her face and hands were puffy, her breasts achy and large. She felt like she inhabited the wrong body.
Finally she wrangled Kathy out of the high chair. The child had made her body go rigid, and Claire held her awkwardly on her lap.
Peter appeared beside them. “Well,” he said, “the party’s on. You only turn eighty once, she said.”
He frowned down at Claire. “Can’t you quiet her?”
“The waitress is getting some milk,” she said. She didn’t mention that she’d forgotten Mimi.
“What a mess,” Peter said.
Kathy’s screams were giving Claire a headache. The baby inside her rolled. The bright noisy restaurant was almost too much. Tears fell down her cheeks. Everything was a mess. She was a mess.
“Claire,” Peter said. “Come on. Stop that.” She could hear in his voice that he still loved her, despite himself. Despite everything.
He tugged on her arm, pulling her up and out of the seat. Claire felt everyone’s eyes on her, a pregnant woman with a screaming child and an angry husband. She cried harder, awkwardly holding her stiff wailing daughter as Peter urged her forward. At the door, the waitress ran up to them, holding out the bottle of milk.
“You’ll need this,” she said, looking at Claire with pity.
Outside, the snow covered everything. It seeped into the tops of Claire’s boots. She pulled Kathy’s hood up.
“Wait here,” Peter said. “I’ll bring the car around.”
Claire watched as his charcoal gray coat disappeared in the snow. Again, she found herself imagining him really disappearing, and never coming back. She imagined calling her old roommate Rose and asking her to come and pick her up. Rose would take her and Kathy back to her house and help her figure out what to do next. Claire squinted at the line of cars inching along beyond the parking lot. Rose had married a pilot and moved to New London, Connecticut. She wondered if that was nearby.
But then Peter drove up, the station wagon skidding to a halt. He leaned across the front seat and opened the door for her. When the interior light came on, Claire paused to study his face illuminated like that. He was handsome, her husband. Even with his dark hair wet with snow and the beginning of stubble along his sharp jaw. Even with his face set hard and his eyes cold.
“Hurry up,” he said. “All we need is for Kathy to get sick on top of everything else.”
Claire sighed, and handed Kathy to him. She had fallen asleep again. Her cheeks were red from the cold and she had snot hardening between her nose and mouth. Peter placed her on the backseat, tucking her little powder blue blanket around her.
He didn’t shift into first gear. Instead, he stared out the windshield, already covered again with snow.
The car grew dark as the snow accumulated on the windows.
“Claire,” he said, his breath a puff in the cold air.
She waited.
“This baby,” he said, but nothing more.
Claire reached for his hand. The leather of his glove was cold beneath her woolen ones. She was glad he didn’t pull away.
Peter turned to look at her. She thought he might be crying.
“Peter,” she said softly, her heart breaking for him, for the mess she’d made of everything. “Don’t even think it,” she told him.
He looked away. “I need to clean off the windshield,” he said, and got out of the car.
They had met on a flight from New York to Paris. Claire had been a TWA air hostess for exactly five years. You flew until you found a husband, that’s how it went. By the time they had stopped to refuel in Gander, Claire already thought Peter would make a very good husband. He had gone to Columbia University, and graduate school at MIT, and now he was off to work at the Pentagon for Hyman Rickover, the man known as the Father of the Nuclear Navy. Peter had an air of importance about him; all of the other girls noticed too. But he only noticed Claire. In Shannon, as they waited to refuel again, he asked her if she’d have dinner with him that night in Paris. They ate in the Eiffel Tower, and had their first kiss at the top. Such a storybook beginning could only lead to happily ever after, Claire had thought.
She had loved her light blue uniform with the silver wing pinned to her chest and the way her hat fit just so above her blond French twist. She loved mixing cocktails for the passengers and the way the men eyed her when she walked down the aisle past them. She and Rose shared a one-bedroom apartment in Manhattan on East 65th Street. They placed an Oriental screen in the middle of the bedroom, with their beds on either side of it. Before they fell asleep, they shared stories about their layovers: the places they’d seen—the Acropolis and the Pyramids and the Eiffel Tower—and the men who had taken them to dinner or for a tour of the city. He’s the one, she told Rose when she got back from that trip. They would move to a big house outside Washington, D.C., and have babies and always remember that dinner in Paris, that dramatic first kiss.
She was lucky, that’s what Claire thought. She was a pretty girl from a small town in Indiana, and she had the whole world right at her fingertips. Then Peter walked onto that Super Constellation, and everything changed.